A Poem of Saint Bonaventure
Week of Monday, July 9, 2001
At a meeting in Atlanta, Bob Fryling, director of InterVarsity
Press, shared with us a poem by Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274) that I found
especially powerful for those of us who care deeply about both the life of
the mind and the heart. Bonaventure was a professor who studied and
taught at the University of Paris, a pastor and later general of the
Franciscan Order, but perhaps most of all he is remembered as a mystic. In
1273 he was elected as the Cardinal Archbishop of Albano.
Bonaventure's poem is found in one of his most famous works,
The Journey of the Mind toward God:
Do not assume that mere reading will suffice without fervor,
Speculation without devotion,
Investigation without admiration,
Observation without exaltation,
Industry without piety,
Knowledge without love,
Understanding without humility,
And study without divine grace.
For people committed to the life of the mind in the context of the
university, and to the growth of the soul in the community of the church,
I find his advice salutary, for Bonaventure cautions us against two
extremes. Instead, he points us to a holistic life that combines rather
than separates intellectual endeavor and spiritual fervor.
On the one hand, Christians who are scholars often struggle
against the deep impulses of anti-intellectualism that disregard,
disparage and generally fail to appreciate the calling to intellectual
contemplation and abstract thought. As Richard Hofstadter showed in his
Pulitzer prize-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964),
our overall culture is biased toward pragmatic concerns and an egalitarian
spirit that often exhibit outright disdain for intellectual work.
Hofstadter also identified “the evangelical spirit” as a third cause of
our culture's anti-intellectualism.
Anti-intellectualism can be especially acute within the church.
Despite numerous advances of evangelicalism within American culture—in
politics, social status, increased wealth and the like (remember, Time
magazine characterized 1976 as The Year of the Evangelical)— overall,
Mark Noll has shown how and why our fundamentalist-evangelical heritage
has been a disaster when it comes to first-order intellectual work. There
are a number of reasons for this, as he documents in his book The Scandal
of the Evangelical Mind (1994), but the result can often be that the
Christian who is an intellectual often feels disenfranchised by our
evangelical church culture.1
Bonaventure's own life is a reminder how the scholarly life of the
mind can be a sacred calling. In his work he emphasized that the created
world is a rational world open to intellectual inquiry by people created
in God's image. Reason and knowledge are divine gifts. He reminds us
that one of the ways we fulfill the greatest commandment to love God is by
loving Him “with all of your mind” (Mark 12:30).
On the other hand, within the university context Christian
scholars often face the opposite extreme, a sort of rationalistic
reductionism that allows no place for religious devotion or cultivation of
the soul. If Huston Smith is correct in his book Why Religion Matters
(2001), “the modern university is not agnostic toward religion; it is
actively hostile to it.” Bonaventure's poem draws special attention to
this hazard. For Bonaventure, human reason is a divine gift to be
celebrated, but the health of the soul is a human necessity that must be
cultivated.
Recently I reread Henri Nouwen's book Finding My Way Home (2001).
He speaks to this second danger. After teaching at Yale and Harvard, for
the last ten years of his life Nouwen lived and ministered at Daybreak
near Toronto, a home for people with severe mental and physical
disabilities. There, he says, he learned that the life of the heart is,
ultimately, more fundamental to being human than the life of the mind:
Somehow during the centuries we have come to believe that what
makes us human is our mind. Even those unfamiliar with Latin know
Seneca's definition of a human
being as a reasoning animal:
rationale animal est homo....(But) what makes us human
is not primarily
our minds but our hearts; it is not first of all our ability to think
which
gives us our particular identity in all creation, but it
is our ability to love...I am speaking
here about something very, very
real. It is about the hidden mystery of the primacy
of the heart in
our true identity as human beings.
In Bonaventure's vision, the ultimate journey we are on is to union with
God and not merely rational inquiry or intellectual achievement.
Human knowledge and academic inquiry are precious gifts that help
us toward our ultimate goal. We must never disparage them, but instead
honor and enjoy them. Nor should we ever separate faith and reason or
play one off of the other. But to reach our final goal, says Bonaventure,
to our speculation, investigation and observation we must add devotion,
admiration, and exaltation. To our industry, knowledge and understanding
we need to include piety, love and humility. Undergirding it all, in our
study we seek divine grace.
- See also Nathan Hatch, The Democratization
of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale, 1989) and two of the many
works by George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (NY: Oxford,
1980), and The Soul of the American University: (NY: Oxford, 1994).
The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself
Copyright ©2001 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.
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